I've been thinking a lot about how childhood games impacted might bias my taste with gaming today. I'm not even talking about liking games that I played when I was younger v. playing newer games or games that I didn't have, but even crafting the very taste of what kind of games I like to play.
I'll use the SNES and my childhood as an example. I tend to think that my SNES collection was phenomenal, excepting one or two games. Here was my collection as I remember:
Super Mario World
Donkey Kong Country
Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past
Final Fantasy II
Secret of Mana
Contra III
Super Metroid
Super Castlevania IV
Mega Man X
Madden NFL '95
Super Ghouls and Ghosts
Demon's Crest
Pilotwings
Kirby's Dream Course
Final Fantasy Mystic Quest
Lagoon
SimCity
(As an aside, holy shit, I have to spend a LOT of money to get all these games again...
)Additionally, I spent a lot of time playing my friends' games, playing mostly Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter among other games.
Now, of the games I owned, I disliked only Mystic Quest and Lagoon...and Madden (well, only because my older brother was so much better at it than me). I've played many games since then, but when you compare like with what's supposed to be better, I think you find an interesting pattern emerging.
Super Mario World > Yoshi's Island
Donkey Kong Country > Yoshi's Island or DKC2 or DKC3
Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past > Ocarina of Time
Final Fantasy IV > FFVI > Super Mario RPG
Secret of Mana > Chrono Trigger
Super Metroid > Anything
Super Castlevania IV > Dracula X
Mega Man X > MMX2 or MMX3
Demon's Crest = great game
SimCity > Sim City 2000
When asked what my top 5 favorite SNES games are (in no particular order), I go with:
Link to the Past
Secret of Mana
Final Fantasy IV
Super Metroid
Donkey Kong Country
(SMW, MMX, SCIV, and Contra III all make the top 20 list, and probably the top 10 if I ever decided to make one.)
(I left out Contra III, Pilotwings, Kirby's Dream Course, and Madden because I couldn't think of anything to which I could compare it. I left out Mystic Quest and Lagoon because I didn't like them.)
Does the above profile say anything about my tastes? Clearly I love the games I owned more than the games I played later. Heck, I can't even play some later stuff like Metroid Fusion and Minish Cap because they annoy me so. And simplistic RPGs don't do anything for me. I don't really like Super Mario RPG and I hate Paper Mario, all because I prefer the complexity of Final Fantasy IV (likewise, I played FFIV before I played FFMQ, so I hated the latter). All these games I can go back to and play regularly, except Super Ghouls and Ghosts because it's so freaking hard!
And it works with positive tastes too, not just negative tastes. I picked up and enjoyed FFV. I played FFVI later and enjoyed it immensely. I also tend to like 2D, topdown action-adventure titles like Zelda, so when I went back to play Secret of Gaia, I naturally liked it. And while I find the voice-acting in SotN ridiculous, I do find that it nicely blends Super Metroid, Castlevania, and RPG-weapon and armor collecting, which I like. But even then, all three of those games don't come close to what I had as a kid.
One more example is Super Mario Kart v. Mario Kart 64. I never really played Super Mario Kart as a kid, but I play Mario Kart 64 a heckuva lot. Which do I think is better? Mario Kart 64. I don't dislike the original, I just think the second has made tons of improvements in just about every category (minus some neat items and the lack of a playable Koopa).
Of course, this doesn't mean I can't go backwards. I never really played much on the NES as a kid (except Zelda and Duckhunt), but I do love playing a good many good games on that system: Mega Man series, LoZ, all three SMB games, Abadox, Gradius, StarTropics, etc... When looking at those, they too, with the exception of shmups which I only recently really started to love, are very similar to the kinds of games I had as a kid on the SNES. A test on the Genesis yields pretty much the same results.
I don't like to think that my past experiences with games influenced what kinds of games I enjoy. I like to think that I can like good games. But I'm willing to admit that the games I grew up with generally defined gaming for me.
What do you think? I also hypothesize that it works the same with movies, music, books, and more, too.
